This disclosure relates generally to the field of management of information technology (IT) services. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, it relates to a technique for improving usability of IT service models.
Business Service Management (BSM) is a methodology of viewing technology infrastructure administration and problem diagnosis from the perspective of its impact on critical business services rather than technology silos. One aspect of BSM involves the development of service models that model the IT services of the enterprise, with component elements of the service model representing business users, services, and IT infrastructure components that provide the services, such as software and hardware components.
On a high level, a service model is a collection of components that represent a business service. A business service can have one or more business processes. Each business process can contain several functional applications, each of which can have multiple IT components. A service model will contain the processes, show how the components are interconnected, and show how component failures propagate and impact the upstream services.
Service models in today's IT environment are typically complex, containing potentially thousands of underlying dependent services and IT components. The representation of these services and IT components is typically done using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where each component of the service model, whether a business user, a service component, or an IT infrastructure component, is represented as a node in the graph. For big service models, however, the visualization aspect may become challenging for the user. On one hand, complex user interface (UI) components can be used to provide as much data as possible about the service model elements so that all information is available to the user without requiring too much screen switching. On the other hand, the complexity of the service models makes it difficult to present the most important data given the limited screen display area that is available.
Furthermore, graphs of complex service models can be very large and difficult to navigate and view. Expansion and contraction of branches can be especially tedious. A user looking at a collapsed node may have no knowledge of the size or complexity of the branches underneath a collapsed node and must manually open the sub-branches one level at a time. If there is a large set of sub-nodes, this can take many actions across many scrolling pages of view.